Contains moments of charm, but offers little in the way of originality, insight or resonance.
A tale of father-and-son bonding from New York Times Sunday Styles columnist Morris.
The author was 44 when his mother passed away; his father Joe was nearing 80. Bob wanted to mourn and celebrate his mother, then move forward with his life. Joe wanted to do the same, but to him, moving forward meant finding himself a babe. Bob didn’t initially approve; he thought it might be a bit too soon for Dad to be dating. But he soon found himself sucked into his father’s quest and eventually spent an inordinate amount of time (successfully) procuring women for this elderly social butterfly. Bob began writing a column about Joe’s hunt for love, and the dating pool grew exponentially. What with all of Bob’s aiding and abetting, father and son grew closer than ever, leading to a happy (and schmaltzy) conclusion. Morris, who performed a truncated version of this book as a monologue at an off-Broadway theater in 2006, is a clever linguist; at one point he notes of his new boyfriend, “I like the Irish. Jack was gorgeously, redheadedly Irish.” Such turns of phrase, however, seem to work better on the stage than the page, and the Bob and Joe story is more fit for a brief performance—or an even briefer newspaper column—than a full-length book. The Morrises would be an enjoyable odd couple to have over for dinner, but they’re the kind of folks you’d forget about immediately after they left—the same can be said for this sweet but fluffy outing.
Contains moments of charm, but offers little in the way of originality, insight or resonance.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-137412-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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